Heretofore articles such as bottles for receiving soft drinks and the like are stacked on a pallet in multi-tiers with a tier sheet or partition positioned therebetween. When operating a filling machine, such as a drink filling machine, it is necessary to supply these articles to the machine at a very rapid rate. Normally the bottles are first deposited on a receiving table and are then wiped by a wiper arm onto a table top chain which feeds the bottles directly to the filling machine.
Attempts have been made to automatically or semi-automatically depalletize the tiers of articles and feed them to the receiving table. Normally, these devices require the pallet to be positioned in a hole adjacent the receiving table so that a wiper arm can wipe the top tier of the articles from the pallet onto a receiving table. Such a device requires an elevator means for sequentially raising the loaded pallet to a height of one tier.
Examples of such a depalletizers are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,974,922, 4,032,021, U.S. Pat. No. Re. 30,742, 3,070,241, 3,917,082. Other patents developed in the search are U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,695,209 and 2,975,911.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,109,802, prior to the top tier of articles being wiped off, a clamp is used to restrain the next lower layer against movement.